"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Monday, March 30, 2009

The Groves Are Down

Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts, number 14:

The groves are down cut downGroves of Ahab, of CybelePine trees, knobbed twigs thick cone and seed Cybele's tree this, sacred in grovesPine of Seami, cedar of HaidaCut down by the prophets of Israel the fairies of Athens the thugs of Rome both ancient and modern;Cut down to make room for the suburbsBulldozed by Luther and WeyerhaeuserCrosscut and chainsaw squareheads and finns high-lead and cat-skiddingTrees downCreeks choked, trout killed, roads.

In this poem Snyder combines references from ancient and modern times, East and West, the Old World and the New.

King Ahab made a grove for idol worship. See 1 Kings 16.33: "And Ahab made a grove; and Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him." Such groves were cut down by Hezekiah and reformers like him, e.g. 2 Kings 18.4: "He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves..."

Cybele was a Phrygian goddess worshipped in mountain groves.

Seami, or Zeami (1363-1443), was a Japanese playwright. Among his plays is The Old Pine Tree.

The Haida are an Indian tribe of the Pacific northwest.

Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 253, identifies Luther and Weyerhaeuser with "Protestantism and corporate capitalism," i.e. Martin Luther and the pulp and paper company Weyerhaeuser.

A squarehead is a German.

Cables are used in high-lead logging.

A skidder transports logs, and a cat-skidder is a skidder manufactured by Caterpillar.